Arvind Parthiban, CEO & Co-Founder SuperOps.ai chats with Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

01:00 - From Zoho to Zarget to Freshworks to SuperOps.ai

11:00 - Finding PMF: It’s About Predictability

18:30 - GTM: Answer These 2 Questions First

24:00 - SaaS Marketing: Lead Gen & Brand Building

33:00 - Why, When & How to work With Industry Analysts

Read the complete transcript below

Shripati Acharya 00:45

Hello and welcome to the Prime Ventures podcast. My guest today is Arvind Parthiban. Co Founder and CEO of SuperOps. I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Arvind, who is a 15 year SaaS veteran who has seen scale zero to one, one to 10 and beyond, as it gives us an opportunity to go through all aspects of the SaaS playbook. So without further ado, Arvind, welcome to prime podcast.

Arvind Parthiban 01:10

Thank you for having me. This is my pleasure. Looking forward to this conversation.

Shripati Acharya 01:15

Absolutely. So before we get to the story behind SuperOps, tell me when and how did you get into the SaaS ecosystem?

Arvind Parthiban 01:25

It’s a funny story. So back in 2005-06, I guess, yeah, so I wanted to do my GRE and go to us. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I thought I didn’t learn much in my college. So I figured out that I’m not good at coding. So I thought, Okay, I need to find something else though I did computer engineering.

So I went and attended an interview to do a part time job because my friend said, You do this job. And then probably, then once you get the GRE and you can go to the US. The interview went for two hours. I happened to speak to this person where I told him that I’m not good at coding. I don’t think I can code but I understand tech. And he started asking me a lot of questions about the tech space I like about routers and switches, and the conversation went deep. Very, very interesting. We didn’t know how much time went by. At the end of the interview he said you’re hired, but I’m going to give you a role called pre sales engineer, where you basically do the tech demos, implementations and so on, but you don’t have to code.

That was my job at Zoho. And the person who interviewed me was Girish Mathrubootham. He was a pre-sales engineer himself in Zoho when he joined. Then later, he became a product manager. I’m a pre-sales engineer who turned into a marketer. So that was our starting point where you understand technology, but you don’t have to code but you can be in tech. So that’s how I got into SasaS.

Shripati Acharya 02:45

And this was which year?

Arvind Parthiban 02:46

This was 2006.

Shripati Acharya 02:48

So what happens next?

Arvind Parthiban 02:51

My journey, right? So it was a very interesting, so some might say it’s a very fancy job where my job is to give demos, close the deal of the the product called services person IT service management product, I did close to 150 implementations after the deal is closed, I have to implement and train the team with us.

So my job is actually traveling around the globe implementing so I get to live a little in their office every week, like different offices, I saw how the product has been implemented, how different culture different people, it was very interesting in the initial days, but 2008, I got tired of traveling, like, literally you feel like you are in Holiday Inns and airports all the time.

And so that day, I decided and I went back to Girish, and I said, You know what, I am tired of this. We were in Austin back then, and I’m tired of this. I want to go back to India, like be in one place and work. So that’s when he asked me for a year and then he moved me into marketing. Product Marketing was the role for the same product. So that’s how I moved into product marketing. And again, in 2008-09, when I say product marketing, people think that you have to take a bag and go door to door and sell, do marketing. Nobody understood online marketing back then.

In Zoho it was one, I think, only there were two product companies back then. So we had to figure out marketing all this by ourselves, I was really lucky enough to be with Zoho. Try 100 things. And figure out this is how we market from India to the globe. A lot of experience by doing and trying because there was no playbook on how to sell from India. So I did marketing, scaled a product from zero to 100 million service desk plus, and the combination of other products. In November 2014 I quit Zoho, and I started Zarget.

Again, all the Freshworks folks invested in it, we raised from Accel, Matrix and Sequoia, raised around 7.5 million, it was good business, we had half a million revenue from the day of the launch of the product.

Shripati Acharya 04:40

What was the product in that?

Arvind Parthiban 04:42

It was a conversion rate optimization software? It’s basically you need to do websites, from the visitor to whatever the end goal is, can be sign up or purchase. How do you actually improve your conversions? So website optimisation, you do AB testing, you do heat map reports and so on. It’s a large market. We started off for SMB, we wanted to build a marketing automation software. The problem I found was, we had 300 Plus customers, small businesses, they don’t change website frequently. Once and after that, it’s like a use and throw software. They’re happy with the product. They used it. I changed my website, I got my goal. I don’t need this. Like it’s not like Flipkart, they’d go and optimize the website every day. Small business, they do it once and then they will only think of the software only when they change the website again after two years.

So this was a pattern, it was not a mission critical software. So we had a choice of either going up market where we also found that enterprise businesses have their own in house conversion rate optimisation team. And a little bit smaller business they buy Adobe or Monetate where the business model is not selling from India, you need to have a consultative selling where decisions are made on a golf course and so on. This was a typical model change. It’s not like we can’t build a product, what I thought was either we pivot into something else in the same space or do a second product. Or if this is part of a bigger product, it will be a feature. If it’s a marketing automation software, this becomes a feature so that churn will not be a big problem.

So that’s when we had a conversation with Girish and we got acquired into Freshworks. In hindsight, it was a very, very good decision. So our exit during the IPO was estimated at $300 million. So we all made money, investors made money, we just took a break. So I headed the marketing for Fresh Books. After that, I flew the blimp on top of the salesforce that was my campaign. I was on the road doing the marching band thing and everything. So it was a great campaign to remember. So two years, I spent with FreshWorks on product marketing, set up the corp marketing and everything. And then once a founder always is a founder, I wanted to start. I had this deal with Girish, I am going back and starting again.

So this time, I wanted to go back to space, I know well. So, all my life I’ve been in IT like building ITSM products and so on. So this time I picked a product, which is basically outsourced IT is called MSP managed service providers. The same products, which I built in my career in IT, I am just taking a vertical outsourced IT and building the same thing in the MSP space. So right now, at SuperOps.ai we are building a PSA and RMM software. And it’s very jargon and boring. It basically helped us with monitoring and desktop management software. So that’s what we are building. It’s been two and a half years now. So this is a 30 year old category. And we can’t just go with one small feature or one module to go into such a space. We are building a platform, we are bundling five different products into one product as a project management, ticketing, monitoring, desktop management, patch management and all these in a single platform, you need to build a lot and so first two years we spent in building the product we recently launched, and we already have 120 paying customers now.

Shripati Acharya 07:50

Oh wonderful. So just to paraphrase there, what you’re saying is that if there is a mid or mid sized enterprise customer, all their helpdesk ticketing you know, I need this access to this software I need this installed I need this login etc my laptop provision all these are trouble tickets now instead of the local in house IT team managing it now increasingly, this is outsourced and the managed service providers are the ones which are actually doing this. And super ops provides them the capability to manage their operations, it’s management for the managed service providers.

Arvind Parthiban 08:20

Correct, they can use our software to manage the clients infrastructure. So for instance, it’s a remote infrastructure, they are not going to be sitting in the same network. So if I have to do patch management from a remote location, I have to take the remote desktop from them. I have to deploy software. I need to put an agent and monitor that asset so that if anything goes wrong, I can proactively fix it like all this can be done with our software.

Shripati Acharya 08:45

Got it. So when you looked at Super ops, how did you go about just doing the ground research to say that there is actually a sizable opportunity here in VC jargon you’d say there is a large enough time here or not?

Arvind Parthiban 08:55

So it’s an interesting question, right? So initially, I wanted to build ITOM. I didn’t want to even pick MSP in the beginning when I was in the research phase. Right before I quit FreshWorks I made up my mind I’m gonna build ITOM( IT Operation Management) software, everybody knows the market is big and Newrelic, you know, all the vendors. Right when we started the research pandemic happened.

So when this pandemic happened, the whole world was panicking. I thought there was an opportunity then that’s when I started doing this research of, Okay, why don’t we sell to MSP so what happened back then was remote working became really normal. Sitting in Detroit, Michigan, moved to Hawaii and they wanted the IT team to manage their laptop. Distributed workforce became very, very normal there. So the same challenges what MSPs had, IT also had, so something has to be managed outside their network outside their site, that security infrastructure, remote accessibility, these are the new challenges that came into play during pandemic.

So we thought this was an opportunity. So I started researching okay, how big is this MSP market and there was a little uptick in the number of MSPs which came into place because they became the arms and legs for the IT team to go and support their employees. So I was doing that number and I already had a commitment with Matrix from my past relationships. So I went and presented it to them saying that this is what the TAM was, I think the TAM was somewhere between four to 6 billion and they researched and they came back and saying that are you sure about the TAM. I was a little taken aback. I thought they’re gonna quote less.

Apparently they said you are missing a zero. So pretty much like in India, if you are a 100 or 200 size company? It’s easy for you to hire an IT guy because it’s cost efficient. In the US before they hire they just outsource, because the labour cost is high there that comes naturally in their way of doing businesses. Till they are big enough for if it’s not critical assets, they try to outsource.

And they have a common resource who can actually help multiple businesses, even in a street, let it be a small dentist office, there’ll be one tech guy. It’s called break fixes. If anything is broken, they’ll just call and he’ll come and fix it right himself. So accounting, all the more than 50% of my market is break fixes is one man guy who has 30+ clients and makes money, right? So this was a huge market, you need to just organise it, but the TAM is too big.

Shripati Acharya 11:25

Wonderful. So now using that to segue into PMF. So clearly, this particular case you solved as you said, use and throw software problem, right? Because this looks like it’s going to be mission critical for the MSP because they are actually doing their everyday work. They’re logging in literally every day on this system if they’re a viable business. So tell me about the moment you realised, Yes, we have product market fit. And this feels good.

Arvind Parthiban 11:50

So there is no formula for it. But at least I would say this is my formula of what product market fit should be because like, I have burned my fingers multiple times to know, okay, is this product market fit. So in Zarget , it was easy for me to sell. Every company that needs it I have to call one of my friends who’s another Sass company and ask him hey buy this product for your website. They will buy it. So we were able to get 300 customers. But in Zarget, did I have product market fit? I would say no. Product Market Fit in my opinion is, it’s not just the product is usable, you should have predictability.

The word predictability is the most important point where they use the product, you are able to generate leads, you’re able to know that if I put this much amount of money, I get these many leads, and these many leads get converted into sales. And even the sales should be predictable how much time it takes for me to convert this particular deal, there is a pattern so that I’ll be able to plan my entire GTM engine and the product usage. Only then you have product market fit and the most important rule I had in my companies, we are going to make 100 paying customers and not even a single one of them should be to someone we know.

It should be lead gen, which was created by marketing, it should be through AdWords or organic lead gen or branding or events, whatever it is, you go generate leads, nurture them, you create a persona, and then the sales closes it and they use the product and product usage metrics should be more than 70% of your customers should use the product. It’s a mission critical product, they should use it day in day out, like at least like there should be metrics to measure the usage also. So if you know this metrics are all matching, then you can confidently say that’s our product market fit.

Shripati Acharya 13:30

I really like that definition. Because in one sense for SaaS companies, it’s very tangible, right? You’re saying 100 customers, 100 can be 50. And it can be 200. But the other thing, which you mentioned that is worth underscoring is not people you know. Because I think that’s the only way you can test your go to market engine, like the fact that people are being acquired through whatever channel they are being acquired.

Arvind Parthiban 14:00

It’s a good and bad thing, which is happening to our ecosystem right now. So it’s like the Y Combinator YC bubble, where you can sell to your own bubble of friends and get to a point of 5 million or 2 million revenue. But will it help me to get 200 million revenue, it’s good that it helps companies to get the initial boost. It’s really needed. I’m not complaining that our ecosystem is helping each other. It is needed.

But we should be aware, it’s about, I did make 2 million. But can I bring that repeatable model ? That’s the only thing I’m saying is that repeatable predictability is very, very important. The initial bump can be given by the friends and family of the SaaS ecosystem. But the predictability is very important for product market fit.

Shripati Acharya 14:40

Fair enough. Otherwise, you hit a ceiling, and then you had to kind of go and rediscover this all over again, and sounds like Arvind you decided to go directly for this piece, which is figuring out whether there are 100 new customers would want your product

Arvind Parthiban 14:55

Exactly, build a predictable, repeatable model. That’s exactly what I’m saying, where you should be able to generate leads, and that you’re figuring out different channels, which is going to work, you need to have a repeatable playbook for sales to go and acquire more customers. And an unknown one person should be able to come and buy your product, that’s the key,

Shripati Acharya 15:15

So what you would say is that, you know, resist the temptation, maybe you can still go and sell it to your network. But don’t confuse that with product market fit.

Arvind Parthiban 15:25

I am not saying don’t sell to people you know. It is good. It’s gonna give you confidence and initial trust and everything. But don’t take it as an indicator as product market fit. Even you might have a two or 3 million revenue, but always be hungry for getting a predictable GTM engine, predictable sales engine, and the repeatable sales engine right so that is important.

Shripati Acharya 15:45

Got it, makes sense. So once you actually start getting these customers and you start feeling I think I am having product market fit. Is that when you started thinking about the business model itself, or were you doing that in parallel?

Arvind Parthiban 16:00

I actually started that on day one to put together a business model plan. In fact, I was working backwards on what is the research from marketing, So I’m a marketer, obviously, I’ll start there, where I did research on how much search volume in AdWords what would be the cost per lead, and kind of did my research on what would be the CAC and then did the reverse maths of should we do SMB first or mid market first so that we can invest… All these kinds of research, we did around business models and decided to choose the channel in which we need to go.

So we today we have close to around 35% brand and organic already, we just launched the product six months back, but 35% of the lead comes from brand because we started marketing from day one, I am quoting lesser because direct is attributed to paid also, if not, it’s actually more, this is a very, very competitive market where 30 year old companies are still in it. So when you have to go into this market if brand and organic is not done the cost of customer acquisition is very, very high.

So to your question, we started thinking about it on day one. Think of it like building the product, if it takes a year for you to build a product, it also takes a year or two for you to even make a small difference in the brand to make small noise or getting organic. So we started investing in business models, brand, marketing everything from day one.

Shripati Acharya 17:20

And in one sense, you need that in order to estimate your total market opportunity. Because if you don’t have an idea, how much are your customers going to pay for it? How do you estimate your own market opportunity?

Arvind Parthiban 17:30

Absolutely, exactly. Again, no matter how good your product is, how smart we are, you’re not gonna get all the answers on day one, right? It’s like constant course correction. So, the way I look at it as as founders, we are like the captain of that ship, we are trying to go in unchartered waters, you need to constantly keep guessing and assume that you are wrong and keep course correcting till you reach the destination, there is no right answers all the time. You make mistake course correct, make mistake course correct. But the point is to have that appetite to course correct and move forward. That is very, very important.

Shripati Acharya 18:05

Perfect. So one of the areas, which you briefly touched upon was the go to market, right? You have written a number of blogs about it as well. So how should one think about go to market, you’re a SaaS founder, you have found product market fit, maybe you’re selling to 40-50 customers? Things look good, you have a basic business model now. Now what?

Arvind Parthiban 18:25

I first ask these two questions, are you in an established category? Or are you in a new category? That’s the most fundamental question. So if you are in an established category, you’re gonna do a catch up game. If you’re a new category, and you are the first person, you need to do an educational game, so the strategy will change based on what you’re trying to do.

If it is a new category, you need to educate, you have advantages and disadvantages where you have to educate and are you piggybacking on some other vendor or some other trend, or you have to completely educate and be the market pioneer. There are different tactics. And if you have to completely educate and you have to own that market, then it’s an upfront investment, you need a lot of investment, you have to work with a lot of influencers. Bring that sense of either fear or greed or whatever the sense you’re trying to bring. And then you have to build the market, usually for smaller companies, it’s tough to do.

But educating a market for the kind of category where if you can piggyback, you are a complementary product for something else. That’s a very, very easy way for you to get an adoption. So all you have to do is make sure you’re part of their marketplace of the companies which you can be complementary to educate, bundle the product, a lot of other activities can help you to get to a 10 million revenue, then you can think of other ways. So all your marketing channels will be through partner channels, or piggybacking on the brand or the trend or something.

So that’s where your marketing tactics will see if it’s a new category. Most of the time, I’ve always been in the established category like that’s the DNA of Zoho FreshWorks or Zarget like we go after the biggest category. And then we want to be the mavericks of that space and the new kid on the block. So that’s how Zoho built CRM, Freshworks built customer support software and Zagat built against a lot of companies and like, that’s our DNA. So when you’re going after the established category, you are playing a market positioning game.

Am I gonna be an enterprise player? Am I gonna be a mid market player? Am I going to be an SMB player? Think of it like this, if you’re entering a phone model when there is iPhone there is Samsung and there is Xiaomi, OnePlus was a new entrant, There are 1000s of phones, They smartly positioning themselves in such a way that people who can’t afford iPhone but they want to have a luxury phone. That was OnePlus, but I don’t want Xiaomi right? It was Just positioning, I don’t want to spend one lakh on a phone, I am okay with spending 50,000.

So that’s how the brand has all the features. But it’s not a cheap phone, right? So the positioning game is very, very important. So you need to understand how I’m going to position and then do your marketing activities accordingly. So marketing activities are two ways. One is for lead gen. One is for brand, brand positioning, and messaging. So don’t confuse both. Lead gen can be different vehicles, your growth marketing, content marketing, outbound everything are lead gen vehicles. Brand positioning messaging is different, that’s the most important place I would start, when you figure that out when you figured the persona, you know how to target it?

Shripati Acharya 21:30

Got it. So let’s split it into two parts then, right? You talked about the lead gen piece, and then you talked about the brand. So going deeper into the lead gen side? What is the role of performance marketing? Because you know, there are mixed opinions on it, right? You’re too dependent on performance marketing, it’s like a drug.

You gotta keep spending, the costs keep rising, they actually rise with scale, they don’t reduce with scale, and so on and so forth. Right. So how does one think about how much to rely on performance marketing? And how would you think about the cost benefit there? And what are the pitfalls?

Arvind Parthiban 22:00

Paid marketing, especially AdWords and all the paid channels, right? Today, it’s become expensive to in fact, as a matter of fact, one of the review sites I’m working with our competitors have put a note saying that no matter how much you increase the cost, let us know we will pay more than that, because that review site is so good. So my growth guys asked me should we bid outbid them? I told them if we outbid them, we are only increasing the cost for everyone else, I will give $2 More than them.

But by doing that we are actually artificially increasing the cost of the market. So I said don’t do that. We can figure out some other site. If you’re going to spend this much, let’s put it somewhere else. What’s happening to the market right now is there are too many people with too much marketing budget, everybody wants to generate leads, no matter what cost. So what happens is we are creating this unfair cost per lead, which is not good for the overall. So there are 30,000 SaaS companies and everybody is writing content, and there’s so much overload of paid.

So this is bound to happen. So we need to be smart and clever in creating leads. So for people who are starting with performance marketing, especially paid channels, I would say have a strategy based on which stage of the company you are at. And the way I am thinking about it, for the first two years, I am okay to pay AdWords or paid channels high. Okay, that’s where you’re trying to figure out your business. This is not the place where I would not want to go and like, try to be organic, because growth is important. You need faster growth, you can’t wait for lead to come through organically.

So it’s okay for my CAC to be a little higher than the initial two years. In the meantime, I need to figure out efficient ways to generate leads, whether it’s outbound, even outbound, it takes time, you can’t have an outbound engine performing in a month, right, it takes its own because there is no intent for people to buy.

When you call and do outbound or you send a mail, there is no intent you need intent leads to come to you. So you need to work on multiple channels. So the way I have given targets to my team is list down 10-15 possible channels for this persona. And try every one of them, have a test budget, which works which doesn’t work, how much am I spending in each channel, because on an average, you should only spend this.

And you need 2 years of time for your organic lead gen also to kick in, and your brand also to kick in. So you need to invest in multiple buckets, so that it averages out. I’m not saying cut out adverts or cut out paid channels, you also need them. The only advice I would say is don’t have all your eggs in AdWords and you start investing in other channels. So that 30% or 40% of your lead comes from paid channels, rest should come from other channels. Till the point of time, it’s okay to use the paid channels, but should not be permanent. If not you will hit a ceiling at one point of time.

Shripati Acharya 24:55

So what’s a good rule of thumb, you said 30 to 40% sustainable is okay, like ongoing after a couple of years? And so the remaining 60%? Or how would you divide that and how much is organic how much is other channels?

Arvind Parthiban 25:10

Somebody who’s organic conversion is better, somebody who’s going to search for a keyword. For us, let’s say it’s network monitoring software. They are going to search on Google and there’s going to be an ad and there’s going to be organic. Most of the techies sometimes scroll down and click on organic links. They are not going to click on the ad. We are trained like that we don’t want to click on ads.

So for you to be in that search your organic lead gen, after two to three years 40% of your lead should come from organic lead gen. Invest in SEO, invest in quality content, PR, build brand, backlinking all these kinds of things will help you get there. So for some companies, it’ll take three to four years, based on how the market is. If it’s really crowded, three to four years, 40% of your lead should come from organic Legion.

Shripati Acharya 25:55

So 40%, organic 40%, performance marketing, and then 20%. Other. So that’s the lead gen part of it.

Arvind Parthiban 26:00

Events can be a very good channel, right? If organic is not working out, I would say include events in it. That’s a better way to spend than paid marketing.

Shripati Acharya 26:10

Makes sense. So these are industry events where most of your sales folks or maybe even influencers are coming over. So that was on the lead gen part. So the second part of it, you said, is a brand. So when do you start doing brand spends, and what are some of the ways in which to go about doing that for a SaaS company?

Arvind Parthiban 26:30

Again, because you’re talking to a marketer, I will say, day one, right, we started our first exercise by going after the market saying that hey we are here. We announced on day one saying that we are cooking something interesting.

See, also because of our nature, the way we have been raised right from our childhood, we don’t want to boast, we don’t want to tell people. That’s a conservative mindset, we all Indians have. We don’t want to do that, what I realised being a marketer and working with multiple marketers in the West, they announced first and then built. I realised that in Zoho we would have finished the feature, then later, we’ll go and say we’ll do pr. Freshworks was the same, we will have the feature and everything. But the competitors, what they do is on their keynote, they announce this is what we’re going to build and they release it next year.

So this is the conservative mindset like branding, we actually don’t do that. So I would urge all our founders to think about it from day one. Branding is very, very important. Because the emotion, the brand is what they want to do business with. At the end of the day, feature selling will go till a point, then it’s the brand selling, you can say that I have more features and they want to catch up like competitors, they will have some features. Feature selling will take you to a point when they get associated with a brand they don’t want to leave.

So when I say four brands, you don’t have to tell me what emotion you feel. Somewhere in your mind, you will feel this is the brand I would want to do business with. So I’ll just say Tata, Reliance, Kingfisher, Which brand do you want to do business with. Subconsciously, the brand makes the decision for you. So that’s the power of a brand.

So it’s very important when they think about the brand, what they feel that emotion has to be invested from day one. As a founder you should have the vision and all your activities, be it your employer branding, your messaging, the content in your website, the product copies, everything will be based on it. So for us the kind of colour we chose in our SuperOps brand, to the font to, the in-product content to everything.

We are a maverick brand. We are the new kid on the block and we are David versus Goliath and we are going to question the legacy vendors. So when you’re going to be an aggressive maverick brand, even the colour choice makes a big difference. So

Shripati Acharya 28:55

So how is the branding for consumer like you gave the names of Tata and Reliance and Kingfisher are consumer brands really, in this case, how is brand building for SaaS different

Arvind Parthiban 29:10

The emotion is the same. I’ll give you the same three bands. You take Atlassian, you take Salesforce, you take Adobe emotion changes for each of this brand. The moment you even think of Atlassian blue colour comes to your mind if you think of Salesforce a different colour comes from Adobe different colour comes. The brand aggressiveness shows in the brand the moment I say.

So these are emotions. I think brand building is important. I’ll double click on what you’re trying to ask again, right? So how can we do? We definitely don’t have enough budget for our brand, in the initial days. What we need to do is do content based branding. Initial days you can write as much as you want, nobody’s gonna hear or listen. So what you need to do is to understand, okay, who can I work with so that I can get a little uplift in the brand.

We started working with close to around 50 industry influencers around the globe. First five influencers, we reached out and said we want to get you on our podcast, we want to talk to you. They said like you’re too small for us to participate. So they literally shooted us back. So then we said okay, let’s do a campaign. We did a campaign for the community to cut social costs and we did a campaign where we invested time and energy to make a difference and then we asked them to participate for that course.

They all participated for that cause. So like you need to keep trying till the influencers work with us. Then later the first 10 podcasts happened. We started posting and giving them credits and like we started investing some money to promote that. So they got the limelight and later all the other people who rejected us came to us and said that we want to be part of the podcast. Initially, I did all the podcasts because it’s important that the CEO talks. And they also feel that, okay, it’s not like another person who’s interviewing. They should be felt important.

So we invested time, every other day. And then there were 50 podcasts in the first three months. Yeah, so we kind of did 50 podcasts called Superpod. And they started sharing everywhere, where we also spoke about the vision, why we started the company, what are we going to do? Literally, pretty much everybody in the MSP market came to know about us.

So investing that kind of effort, then we did a meet up, we met, we brought them all together. So we invested in the brand. And then we did kind of having a strong opinion when one of the acquisitions happened. What we did is we kind of said that this acquisition is actually bad for the ecosystem. When Datto got acquired by Cassia. We gave a way out for all the customers saying that if you move now we’ll give the product away for free.

There was some backlash there. Then when Datto did their conference, we did a flash mob there. We did a flash mob and like every other channel covered it. And the first time I went to an event two years back in Dallas, we had to tell who SuperOps was. This time when I went to a different event in Dallas. Every vendor knew who SuperOps was, every customer knew who SuperOps is. They came to our booth and said that flashmob was a smart thing. And they gave a high five like, like, the difference in two years, I could see literally how the brand has come a long way.

Shripati Acharya 32:35

So that’s really consistent with the maverick Maverick brand doing a flash mob in the user conference. And do analysts have a role in brand building? When I’m talking about analysts, I’m talking about industry analysts like Gartner or Forester or what have you. So when are they relevant? And how should we engage with that?

Arvind Parthiban 32:55

So if you’re selling a product to mid market and enterprise, you should do it, there is no choice, SMB, you have a luxury to wait because the external buyers are not going to really worry about the brand in the initial days to make a decision. But there is a saying, nobody gets fired when they choose Salesforce or ServiceNow. There’s a reason why they say it. They want to be on a safer side, they want to know who they do business with. And if they’re gonna invest more than $20,000 with a tech company, they definitely need that trust to be built and they want to invest only in a company which they trust. So how does trust come?

That’s when this analyst comes in, you have to understand that you can’t just say I’ll pay $30k and put me in the magic quadrant. They have their due diligence to do. They are going to keep watching you. Do you have all this feature? You have to invest, you have to show that I’m here for a long time. And the first time I did the Gartner magic quadrant at Zoho, I had to work almost one and a half years backwards.

Briefing calls every month, keeping them posted saying that I built this and asked them okay, what do you think is missing for us to get to magic quarter, they’re gonna give you four or five things. Continuously show, ask what is your opinion, make them feel important, they’re gonna give their inputs, have multiple briefing calls, have multiple inquiry calls, that shows that, oh, this company is trying, right?

Once you do all that mean, you have enough features and enough customers, they’re gonna put you in the Magic Quadrant. And this analyst relationship is very, very important. So magic quadrant is maybe a different league, there are other peer reviews that are other things where you can actually do a report with them. Like there’s so many things, the point is about engagement.

So having their logo is going to give the trust to the customers and for all the other founders who are listening who are not marketers, and that is for marketers to explain to them, see not everything is direct ROI, where I put X amount of money, I get these many leads. It’s very simple, right? It’s not rocket science. But how will you measure brand and trust?

So you need to also have different metrics to understand this right? If you’re doing an outbound call, and you call and say I’m calling from SuperOps, maybe few know, few don’t know. If you say, Hey, we are SuperOps we have been recently listed in the magic quadrant. That opens the door.

And when you have a price, let’s say you are on a demo call and your salesperson has given a comparison between you and your competitor, assuming your competence is not in the magic quadrant, that’s the point for them to win the deal. The trust and brand this kind of analyst relationship helps can be directly measured as an ROI. But it makes a big difference.

You need to measure that by talking to your sales and how they are bringing up these kinds of analyst relationships and so on. So, it is important especially if you’re in enterprise, you don’t have a choice. Mid-market, you have to start investing in it. SMB initial days, maybe no, but later, you definitely have to also figure out analyst relationships for brand building

Shripati Acharya 35:55

Makes sense, I will just add that it is often overlooked because one, we don’t have that kind of an ecosystem in India, where they are part of the decision making process. And so we often underestimate how core they are to the CIOs of the target customer companies.

And as you said, they cannot only help in lead gen, they can actually help you in price protection, and justifying the pricing over the competition and so on and so forth. So I’d love to get into your go into more, but we are out of time here.

So Arvind thanks a lot. Took away a number of things from your quantification of product market fit to making it very specific about the number of customers and how you get them and the whole cycle to the core of brand building, which is having that idea from day one. Announce first and then build. I think I would just say that that’s something which definitely Indian SaaS founders probably are reluctant to do. And so many great takeaways there. So thank you so much for your time. We had a terrific conversation.

Arvind Parthiban 36:55

It’s been a pleasure to be with you again. Anytime let me know happy to participate again and there’s so much I can keep talking about marketing and sales. Thank you so much for having me.

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